Hilary Masters, Novelist and Son of American Poet, Dies at 87

For a 7-year-old, Hilary Masters sounded precociously lyrical when he arrived in New York for the first time and remarked, “Oh, boy, Mom, what glory is ahead of me!”

But while spending the summer of 1935 with his parents in the Chelsea Hotel, he solemnly decided against following in the footsteps of his father, the prolific poet Edgar Lee Masters.

“You have to wait to write the poetry, and then you have to wait for the editor to print it before you get paid,” Hilary Masters sagely explained at the time to a reporter for The World-Telegram. “I might as well be an airplane pilot when I’m big.”

Mr. Masters, who was 87 when he died on Sunday at his home in Pittsburgh, became neither a poet nor a pilot. Instead he got a job as a theatrical press agent, ran a playhouse in the Hudson Valley, ran for a seat in the State Assembly, edited a local newspaper, worked as a photographer, taught college students and, most notably, wrote novels.

Taking a leaf from William Faulkner, he once mused that all novelists are failed poets.

In an interview with The Tartan, the student newspaper at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he was a professor of English and creative writing for 32 years, Mr. Masters elaborated on the reason he turned to writing novels, short stories, essays and a memoir.

“I realized I couldn’t write poetry,” he said. “I needed more space.”

Hilary Thomas Masters was born on Feb. 3, 1928, in Kansas City, Mo. He was named for an ancestor from Virginia who fought in the American Revolution. A grandfather was an Irish immigrant who patrolled the West with the United States Cavalry not long after Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn in 1876.

His father was the author of “Spoon River Anthology” and other poems and biographies. His mother, the former Ellen Frances Coyne, was a professor of English.

Sizing up the younger Mr. Masters’s memoir “Last Stands: Notes From Memory” (1982) in The New York Times Book Review, the poet Donald Hall described the book as “small, whole and thoroughly satisfying.” Mr. Masters portrays his father (1868-1950) as “complex, not especially admirable, but curious, determined,” Mr. Hall wrote, while the author’s mother, the poet’s much-younger second wife — “an admirable creature of true dignity” — emerges as the hero.

Image

Mr. Master's father, the prolific poet Edgar Lee Masters, in 1946.CreditThe New York Times

Until he was 14, when he came East, Hilary Masters was raised by his maternal grandparents in Kansas City and spent summers with his parents at the Chelsea.

“My father worked every single morning, and I remember awakening on the hotel sofa to watch him smoking and writing, his eyes so intense they were terrifying,” Mr. Masters told The Times in 1982. “Then he’d look up and start giggling. He had a terrific sense of humor.”

He added: “He was 60 when I was born, and, having three kids of my own, I know the writer’s worst enemy is distraction. So he tried to work out the best arrangement for everybody. While our times together were condensed, they were pleasurable.”

Mr. Masters attended Davidson College in North Carolina, served in the Navy as a correspondent and received his bachelor’s degree from Brown University in 1952. After promoting concerts, dancers and Off Broadway theaters, he and his first wife, Polly Jo Masters, ran the Hyde Park Playhouse, whose patrons included Eleanor Roosevelt.

Mr. Masters recalled that Buddy Reynolds, later and better known as Burt, made his professional acting debut at the playhouse in the comedy “My Three Angels.” Mr. Masters later owned and edited The Hyde Park Record, a weekly newspaper.

His career as a novelist began in 1967 with the publication of “The Common Pasture,” about black homeowners displaced by a shopping mall. A 1969 novel, “An American Marriage,” centered on a love affair between a professor and his pupil. The New York Times Book Review said the author displayed “keen sensitivity to ordinary life,” adding: “If there were a literary synonym for ‘painterly,’ one could say that Mr. Masters has it: a verve in shaping and coining language.”

At Carnegie Mellon, where he had been a professor since 1983, Mr. Masters was scheduled to teach a course this fall. He is survived by his wife, Kathleen George, a professor and novelist, who said he died after complications of surgery; three children from his previous marriage, Joellen, Catherine and John Masters; and a grandchild.

In his 2006 interview with The Tartan, Mr. Masters recalled that he had read voraciously as a child, especially Daniel Defoe, and decided that literature would be his vehicle for storytelling. In his official university profile, he wrote, “My work sounds themes of abandonment — the different kinds of abandonment, physical, spiritual and moral — while I try to represent men and women in contemporary America.”

In 2003 Mr. Masters received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He “recovers the past world around him to bring us an immediate present when every day is a ‘radiant capsule of time,’ ” the academy said.

But in the Tartan interview, Mr. Masters maintained that such immediacy was momentary. “The past is actually going on in the present,” he said. “As you and I are sitting here talking, it’s over.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Hilary Masters, Novelist Son of Famed Poet, Dies at 87 . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Get the Book Review Newsletter

Be the first to see reviews, news and features in The New York Times Book Review.